oritsu_luv | it is a marvel that those red-roseleaf lips of yours...

...should be made no less for the madness of music and song than for the madness of kissing. Your slim gilt soul walks between passion and poetry.

(exerpt from Oscar's most famous letter to Bosie.)

Actual Bosie (and the guy whose face is half cut off is some friend of his):

Jude Law as Bosie in 'Wilde':

I think Oscar would have approved. ;)

In other words, I am still loving my book on Oscar Wilde. It conjures up the same world I loved so much in biographies about Natalie Clifford Barney.

Oscar and Natalie are sort of inextricably linked, actually, in three ways.

1) In 1882 Oscar saved a tiny Natalie from a group of boys who were tormenting her. Her mother Alice would record the intimate conversations she shared with Oscar during their stay at the summer hotel in NY.

2) Natalie's lover Olive Custace married Bosie, and Natalie and Bosie became friends through Olive.

3) In the 20s, Natalie had a long and passionate affair with Dolly Wilde, Oscar's beautiful and brilliant, and unstable niece who was in turn obsessed with her infamous uncle.

Apparently my love of Oscar and Bosie is not new. I was browsing the Unofficial Website of Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas - how it amuses me that Bosie has an unofficial website! - and realized that I am already the proud owner of:

Bosie: A Biography of Lord Alfred Douglas

And also,

Oscar and Bosie: A Fatal Passion

Although I'm not sure where either of those books are - somewhere in CT - and I don't think I finished either of them. But still.

Also, and not entirely in conclusion, being a rentboy in Victorian London seems to have been a pretty sweet deal. LOL